Pod and Man at Yale

Theologian Carl Trueman Previews His New Book; Yale Students on Faith on Campus

On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Christian theologian and Grove City College Professor Carl Trueman breaks down the central question and broader implications of his new book, The Desecration of Man [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/729796/the-desecration-of-man-by-carl-r-trueman/]:  * “If you ask somebody, who are you? That question is incredibly complicated today in a way that it wouldn’t have been, say, six or seven hundred years ago.” * “If you want to shock people, you have to smash the orthodoxy of the previous generation. And there is no more powerful orthodoxy politically than thinking that Hitler was an evil and bad person. So, the emergence of a Fuentes doesn’t surprise me. What’s fascinating about Fuentes is, of course, is that he really has nothing positive to say…It is a purely flame throwing exercise which absolutely conforms to this pattern of desecration.” * “The best way to make somebody realize they’re a human being is to treat them as a human being.” * “I would say one of the key applications or key uses of technology, if you like, would be, that which restores those things that as humans, we should have, but which we've lost is good. Example: if a child is born with one leg and somebody develops a way of, you know, allowing that child to grow the leg that they're missing, I would not see that as an obnoxious use of technology. It's restoring what should be there. It's getting rid of a privation.” * “Practical advice I might give to somebody who says, ‘well I did this and my friend took real exception’... Even if you find their views obnoxious, listen to what they have to say because the mere act of listening will indicate that you’re taking them seriously as a human being.” For the student panel, Brett Mellul ’29 and Jack Ehlert ’29 discussed their experiences navigating faith on campus: * Ehlert: “I think conversations about religion happen in a way at Yale that honestly, maybe they didn't even happen between friends in high school and grade school…I've had a lot of really great conversations with people of the Jewish faith or like non-Catholic Christians or atheists and things—the sort of conversations that I didn’t really have as much before.” * Ehlert: “I think I've really been forced to sort of hold myself accountable and take my faith responsibility into my own hands, which has been really a great experience, honestly.” * Mellul: “From a mindset perspective, I don’t view it as, oh, I have to keep the Sabbath and therefore I don’t get to study or go to the football game or do whatever it is. I view it as the opposite. I get to keep the Sabbath, and I try to find all the beauty and meaning and connection that there is in the things that I already do.” * Mellul: “I think that I’ve had a lot of opportunities on campus, to be an ambassador, so to speak, for particularly Orthodox Judaism. And, so, whether that’s just having lunch with a friend who is not an Orthodox Jew or not Jewish at all, or that’s the way that I answer a question in a class or even just the way that I comport myself while walking to a class on campus, I think is an opportunity to positively, make an impact.”  Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.  Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

“Constantly Being Challenged”: What the Yale Experience Can Be; Dr. Jacob Howland on Fixing the Modern University

On the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley fellows Noah Torrance ’28 and Blake Freeman ’29 talk about their experience with open discourse at Yale.   * Noah Torrance: "Maybe not everyone goes through Yale constantly being challenged in some way, but I think I definitely have. And the spaces that I've found in Yale, like the Buckley Institute, do a really great job of that." * Torrance: "I was actually doing a campus tour…through one of the protests, through the Beinecke encampment, I was like, what’s going on over here? Somebody sitting? Are they camping?" * Blake Freeman: "This is kind of cool because it’s like, okay, we expect our students to be active. We expect our students to be vocal about the things they care about. But we’re…going to set up this framework where they’re able to do it in a very constructive way." * Freeman: "When I was growing up, I knew people who thought it was a better idea to be a garbage collector than to go to university.… It’s disappointing to me because universities do useful things and great things all the time.” Jacob Howland, past University of Austin Provost and Dean and former professor at the University of Tulsa, discusses the major issues plaguing higher education and the ways to course correct.  * Howland: "The future, from my point of view, always grows out of the soil of the past. You know, if we look at sort of the most creative geniuses in music and literature and so forth, they’re very well acquainted with what came before. " * Howland: "We should hold up and celebrate professors who actually create the conditions for real learning, such as I’ve described, open inquiry, civil discourse whose syllabi reflect all positions who privilege the questions." * Howland: "I came to the University of Tulsa in 1988, and shortly after I got there, I remember meeting a young woman and she said, what do you teach? And so forth. And I said, well, Plato and Aristotle, ancient Greeks, etc. I said, well, what do you do? And she said, well, I sure as hell don't teach dead white males." * Howland: "The AI thing might be the biggest crisis. Because if it is the case, which I'm convinced it is, that many students, perhaps the majority, perhaps in some cases almost all of them, and not just students, by the way, professors too are relying on AI to do their work, then what we're going to have is students graduating essentially from what are now just diploma mills."  Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.  Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

“That had explosive potential”: Yale Students and AEI’s Dr. Ben Storey on the Liberal Arts and Fixing Higher Ed

In the first episode of the spring semester, Lux et Veritas Leadership Fellows Audrey Bae ’28, Joe Gicante ’28, and Constantine Semka ’28 discuss the value of liberal arts, why they think it's worth it to pay Yale tuition to study the humanities, and what liberal arts can teach us about Trump and Venezuela: * Semka: “I think maybe that liberal education sets you back in the first couple years, but it really gives you an advantage later in life because what we learn in liberal education is how to think. How do I acquire knowledge in a faster, more efficient way.” * Semka: “Liberal arts gives you a very strong foundation on which you can build later your career and what many people from other countries lack is that strong foundation.” * Gicante: “…it’s difficult to teach somebody to be creative. That's not something you can learn in a classroom, right? There’s no creativity 101. That has to come from learning how to think and thinking through different systems, which is what a liberal arts education really is.” * Bae: “I would much rather take the time now to seriously reflect on the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to lead, so that I can live my life with no regrets even if in this initial process it seems to be very slow or inefficient.” American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Ben Story discussed the liberal arts, the challenges facing higher education in America, and his current efforts to fix it: * Storey: “In Iraq under Saddam Hussein there were plenty of people studying things like engineering, dentistry, medicine, so on and so forth. All that stuff that was fine, uncontroversial….When John started promoting the study of history, study of literature, study of philosophy, that had explosive potential.” * Storey: “The overwhelming homogeneity of a discipline such as sociology makes it the case that the kinds of questions that progressives care about just get investigated again and again and again.” * Storey: “The polite brush off has been the basic response of colleges and universities to conservative critics for a very long time. Well, you have to hand it to the Trump administration. They’ve actually gotten beyond the polite brush off.” * Storey: “People on the right should remember that the new means that Trump has effectively legitimized by using them with respect to the universities, well, they’re probably going to be used in the other direction.” Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.  Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

Liberal Yale Students on Buckley and Yale; Daniel Flynn on the Frank Meyer Legacy

In the most recent episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Buckley Fellows Nico Sahi SOM ’26 and Toby Neal ’27 talk about being liberal at Yale and as members of the Buckley Institute:  * Nico Sahi: “I really wanted to learn a little bit more about conservative ideologies, partly because maybe I’ll change my own mind about something, but also that you can’t debate something that you don’t understand yourself.” * Toby Neal: “The recent events of the Charlie Kirk assassination were very much on my mind because that kind of—is kind of the reason that I joined Buckley in a sense, that I wanted to join in a space where conversations, even though difficult, were being had and you could have a very democratic debate about it.” * Neal: “We are more and more facing echo chambers in our lives. Institutions, higher education are echo chambers. And I think that’s where places like Buckley are important…” * Neal: “It is less that my mind has been changed–I tried to reflect on if there was some actual point where I’ve changed my opinion on something and I don’t think I have. But what I think it has is helped me understand where the other people are coming from.” * Sahi: “Over the past 10 years, the consistent story has been ‘we need to talk to more people who disagree with us.’ And I think everyone hears that information and goes, ‘yes absolutely’ and then goes back and talks to everyone that already believes [what they do.]” Daniel Flynn, author of The Man Who Invented Conservatism: The Unlikely Life of Frank S. Meyer, joined the podcast to discuss his book on the largely forgotten ex-Communist who shaped the modern conservative movement: * Flynn: “All the way through this story there’s this kind of Forrest Gump quality to it where [Meyer] is around these people at the right time when they are happening, when they are exploding.” * Flynn: “He establishes something called the October Club, which, when Frank gets to Oxford, there are zero Communists in the student body. When he leaves, there’s 300.” * Flynn: “Do you want to join a movement where the guy’s looking down at his shoes and he’s got a bunch of marbles in his mouth, or do you want to join a movement of a guy who’s a winner? Frank was a winner and people wanted to be around him. That’s why he had such success in England as a Communist organizer. Also, why he had such success in America.” Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.  Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst

“What’s The Vision”: Fellows Inspired by Hamilton; Richard Brookhiser on the Founders’ Continuing Impact

In the newest episode of Pod and Man at Yale, Mickey Lin ’26 and Justin Greenman GSAS reflect on their trip to see Hamilton on Broadway with the Buckley Institute and discuss their thoughts on the Founders: * Lin: “When I was working on the Hill and I had to give capital tours, I was like, now, looking back, yeah, we never really talked about Hamilton…” * Greenman: “I think there’s this perception that, oh, we’ve never been more divided. No, we have been extremely divided, right—you think of Hamilton and Burr, you think of Hamilton and Jefferson—it’s a reminder that, right, history maybe—what was the Mark Twain line, history doesn’t repeat but it rhymes.” * Lin: “I think it’d be interesting to see a Founding Fathers course or an early American politics course and for first years to take. I think it’s hard to be a political science major and continue to study politics…without having a strong foundation on the Founding Fathers.” * Greenman: “I’ve found that a lot of people are, if not dismissive of the Founding era ideals, they’re just kind of uninformed.” * Greenman: “Those ideas, those values, those passions that Mickey talked about, they’re still the foundation of America.” Richard Brookhiser, noted author and journalist, joined Buckley Fellows at Hamilton then stuck around for dinner to discuss the play and the Founders: * “The principles under which slavery was finally ended in this country were principles enounced by the founders.” * “It is a true point that we also have to realize that [the Founders are] not just talking only to each other or in some kind of rarified common room. They are presenting their ideas to the American public. And the American public is reading them, reacting to them, debating them.” * “Good stories just beat bad ones. They beat dull ones and they beat stupid ones. And a smart story of the American Revolution and of the construction of the government that followed, is a dramatic story; it's an interesting story; it's an intelligent story. There’s a lot of intelligence involved by the actors and you have to bring some intelligence to bear to understand everything that was going on. And it's a story that's not that long ago and still affects us today. How are you gonna beat that?” * “I remember I was on some panel in New York, at the New School, and this older man came up to me and said, ‘Are you still in touch with Bill Buckley?’ (who’d retired by then), and I said ‘yes’ and he said, ‘Well can you thank him for me? I’m a radical but he was the only place where you got to see radicals talking at length because he’d bring them on to Firing Line and debate them.” Subscribe to get all Buckley Institute updates at buckleyinstitute.com.  Follow us on Twitter @BuckleyInst